Burns’ films strive to unite modern Americans through a shared understanding of the past. Personal displays of political partisanship would make that difficult, so beyond stumping for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Burns’ has always remained publicly neutral on the day’s political events and issues. Yet during his speech at Brandeis, Burns broke with this tradition, and voiced dire political concerns. Without naming Donald Trump directly, he warned of the potential calamity a second Trump presidency would bring.
Trump’s hyper divisiveness is in direct contrast to Burns’ plaintive, gather-round-the-maypole interpretation of America. And even nearly a year ago, Burns already grasped the threat that Trumpism poses to U.S. constitutionalism and democratic institutions. In many ways, Burns and Trump couldn’t be less alike, and Burns spoke with gravitas, as if he felt duty-bound to move beyond his comfort zone and warn the nation, even if he was preaching to the choir at Brandeis.
Yet the distance between Donald Trump and Ken Burns is neither so simple nor so vast as it seems. It may sound counterintuitive, but Ken Burns’ version of U.S. history actually has quite a bit in common with Trump’s version. I think that if we’re willing to look past all their obvious differences, and identify their subtle intellectual overlap, we can perhaps learn more about what it means to be American today than we ever could from Burns’ saccharine films or Trump’s racist rants alone.
Burns opened his commencement address with the line: “I am in the business of history.” He must be commended for putting forward a perfect self-definition. Burns is not a professional historian, nor is he very good at practicing history as a layman. His films are typically error-riddled accounts of the past that rest upon unsophisticated and even naive interpretations more platitudinal than profound. But he does generate a lot of money by doing it. He’s a businessman and film maker with an interest in history: a history buff with a camera and an ear for good voice actors. And much of the commencement speech that followed his opening line, particularly the first half of it, exposed his poor historical understanding. That, perhaps, was to be expected. But more surprising to anyone familiar with Burns and Trump is that the former’s understanding of American history is, in many ways, in line with the latter’s beliefs, no matter how vociferously the two men would deny it.
Let’s start with Abraham Lincoln.
Burns’ has made a fetish of Lincoln for a very long time; indeed, fetishizing Lincoln is partly what made Burns famous thirty-five years ago when his breakthrough series, The Civil War, debuted on PBS. So it was no surprise his commencement address eventually quoted young Abraham Lincoln and celebrated him as a paragon of American virtue whose values can guide us nearly 200 years later.
But in the 1830s, young Abraham Lincoln was a white racist nationalist. His solution to the increasingly contentious issue of slavery was to send all of the blacks back to Africa. This was a well established social and political platform in the pre-Civil War North. Organizations such as the American Colonization Movement (est. 1816) advocated repatriating free blacks to Africa on the grounds that they could never assimilate into American society. Between 1820–43, supporters of this Back to Africa movement facilitated the emigration of more than 4,500 African Americans to the African colony of Liberia, where they faced an appalling death rate.
Today, a clear, succinct statement of ante-bellum repatriation ideology sounds like a bad racist joke. Back then, most African Americans opposed repatriation, and abolitionists, both black and white, were openly hostile to it. But Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s was not an abolitionist; he would need another three decades to come around to that stance. By any reasonable definition of the word, in any period of time, young Abraham Lincoln was a racist. And he continued to publicly advocate repatriation until at least 1854, when he switched over to Free Soil: a new ideology that sought to contain African Americans in the South, and ban them from the new Western territories and states so those places could become a white man’s paradise. For example, the constitutions of Oregon Territory and Kansas Territory banned both, slavery and black people altogether.
It is uncomfortable and surprising for many Americans to learn that Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s–50s championed ideas now associated with virulent racist fascists: “improving” America through white supremacy in the name in the name of Jesus. People who believe this today have rallied to Donald Trump. Trump openly welcomes them, and seems quite racist himself. Yet, there was Burns, warning of Trump one minute, and cheerfully lauding young Abraham Lincoln the next.
To be clear, I’m not calling Burns racist. I don’t think he is. And of course his discussion of young Abraham Lincoln wasn’t about the repatriation movement. I’m sure Burns would maintain those views were irrelevant to the point he was making about young Lincoln. And on some level, they are. But on another level, this is the problem. U.S. history (and the history of every other nation, for that matter) is soaked through with racism, sexism, and classism in one form or another. And the only way we can ever truly overcome those plagues is by confronting them. Yet we rarely do that. We erase the racist aspects of Lincoln, for example, and instead hail him as the man who saved the nation (yes) and freed the slaves (actually, Congress, the Northern states, and the slaves themselves did that).
Let’s take another example. During his commencement address, Burns described 1830s Canada and Mexico as “two relatively benign neighbors.” I think I audibly sighed when I heard him say this. It’s a perverse statement, and the kind of nationalistic U.S. mythology Burns often champions from behind the camera.
In this case, “benign” serves as a euphemism for Canada and Mexico being targets of U.S. expansion during the 1830s–40s. In 1846, President James K. Polk and his supporters pushed bold-faced lies to justify the U.S. invasion of Mexico, and the eventual seizure of one-third of that nation. This is how everything from California to New Mexico became part of the United States. There were also U.S. threats to invade Canada. But whereas Mexico was recently independent and vulnerable, Canada was still a British colony and enjoyed the full backing of that mighty empire, which effectively prevented those threats (54-50 or fight!) from materializing into action. Instead, Polk negotiated a treaty with the British that landed the United States Oregon Territory (modern Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and bits of Wyoming and Montana) with Canada taking British Columbia; the Native peoples who lived there be damned.
If it seems like I’m being unfair to Burns, that I’m nitpicking to make a mountain from a mole hill, then ask yourself this. Why, exactly, do Trumpists across the nation want to sanitize U.S. history, and ban children from learning anything meaningful about slavery, Jim Crow segregation, women’s rights movements, LGBT rights movements, Latinx history, and the genocides and dispossessions of Indigenous peoples?
It’s because they know that ongoing racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and settler rule depend on sanitized versions of history. Denying the nasty bits of the past makes it easier for people to deny that nasty things going on today. Modern racists typically deny that they’re racist, or that there even is any racism anymore, and denying the racism of the past paves the way for them to do that. Whereas soberly confronting the racism of the past makes people sensitive to the racism of the present.
Ken Burns’ films are sensitive to issues of race. Very sensitive, in some cases. I’m not calling him a villain. Far from it. But the examples I’ve cited are typical of how his films often whitewash American history. He’s in the business of advancing romantic myths about American exceptionalism. He poetically defines the United States as a land of unique and beautiful inventions (baseball, jazz, fancy bridges, representative democracy) and inspiring heroes (Lincoln, Jack Johnson, Lewis and Clark, Frank Lloyd Wright), and as a nation spiraling towards possible perfection as it continually builds greatness and overcomes correctable errors. He casts the nation’s tumult (the Civil War, the Dust Bowl, Vietnam) as tragic and heart wrenching events that somehow serve to make the American experience more human and beautiful. The first dozen or so minutes of Burns’ commencement speech exemplify these shortcomings, which are central to many of his films.
Ultimately, both Ken Burns and Donald Trump are deeply committed to their own versions of American exceptionalism: the idea that America is not just special, but especial, unique and uniquely great. Even though the specifics vary greatly, American exceptionalism is a hallmark of both, Burns’ New England Liberalism and Trump’s right wing Christian ethnonationalism. Burns and Trumpists may have different heroes (Lincoln instead of Andrew Jackson, Johnson instead of the Great White Hope), but they still put presidents, generals, and athletes on pedestals. They may have very different views on religion, race, class, and gender, but they both have very strong views on these subjects, and see them as central to forging a more perfect union whose potentially starlit future is reflected in its especial past.
I do not want to overstate the similarities, and I certainly do not want to create a false equivalency. Burns wants us to learn from the past while Trump looks to resuscitate some of its worst elements. Trump’s version of America is monstrous, and infinitely worse than Burns’ doe-eyed naivete. And to that point, I suspect Burns’ sentimental adoration of America and the American ideal, while shading his historical understanding, does help him recognize the very real and present threat to U.S. democracy that Trump and some of his supporters pose.
I, for one, reject the notion that the United States was founded with God’s blessing or exists as His favored nation. I also reject secular versions of that sentiment. This is a nation-state, inextricably connected to 200+ others in the modern world. It is also a hugely successful empire, like many that have come before it. It owes as much of its good fortune to horror and dumb luck as it does to the pursuit of a more perfect union. And it will, like all other nations and empires, fall one day, perhaps dramatically and suddenly amid meteors or warfare, or more slowly through aimless evolution or a soft coup. And that may happen sooner than many of us once suspected.
It may already be happening.
This essay first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.